T he oldest joke I know, the oldest joke that a real person quite probably told on a quite probably actual occasion, is one ascribed to Sophocles. Ion of Chios, a lesser poet, claimed he...
O n the eve of the general strike across southern Europe in November 2012, I joined a few thousand members of the CCOO, Spain’s largest trade union, for a march through Madrid. They set...
L enin, it’s said, danced in the snow once the Bolshevik government had lasted a day longer than the Paris Commune. He was in awe of the Communards, and his tomb is still decorated with...
T hinkers who pondered the mysteries of nature used to be known as ‘natural philosophers’. For centuries there wasn’t a separate term for those few individuals who practised...
H ow much weight should we give to unpleasant revelations about the private lives of thinkers? It partly depends on what kind of thinker we’re talking about. When it was discovered a few...
I n 1685, Louis XIV’s few surviving teeth were in such a parlous state that they required extraction, but the dentist operated so ineptly that he also removed a large section of one of...
Bathtubs play a small but significant role in the Iliad.
I n the explosion of recent books about the First World War – many of them excellent, almost all packed with narrative excitement, but not all breaking new ground – Isabel...
M y NCT classes gave the impression that childbirth in Britain is dominated by doctors who foist painkillers on women against their better instincts, leading to a ‘cascade of...
The persecution of the Armenians didn’t start in 1915, and wasn’t a First World War event as per the official Turkish line.
T o the relentlessly autobiographical, a pothole in the road, no matter how dangerous to people in general, will quickly bring to mind the time their pram was nearly sent off the pavement into...
I shall call my memoirs ‘Fifty Years a Bag Lady’. That is what papyrologists do: they pick over the written rubbish of antiquity for items of interest. You can learn a lot...
I n scope and ambition David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking is reminiscent of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Both offer a strident critique of Western...
A mong many technical advances in archaeology in recent years, dendrochronology is one of the most satisfying. Now cloven and carved wood can speak to us and tell us its age. It needs the...
F rom the time of the Crusades onwards, Western military interventions in the Near and Middle East have nearly all been disastrous; in the long run – just look at Iraq today – but...
I n the early sixth century bce the Persians occupied a small region known as Parsa (Persis to the Greeks), now Fars, in south-west Iran. They were allies, perhaps subordinate allies, of the...
I stanbul lately has the feeling of a crime scene. The Gezi protests are over but life has got weirder: the black police helicopters always hovering; the intimidation of dissenters on Twitter...
When the Health and Social Care Bill was passed into law at the start of 2012, it elicited one of those usually impotent hashtag campaigns seen so often on Twitter, where thousands of people using the...